LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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Shelf ...£i'.... 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 




JOHN G. WHITTIER 

li'rom a photograph taken in Jult/, 1885 



WHITTIER 



Ny^ .^v. '•^.N: 



NOTES OF HIS LIFE AND OF HIS 
FRIENDSHIPS 



BY 
MRS. JAMES T. FIELDS 

ILLUSTRATED 




NEW YORK (^^^ y 

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS ^ 



l%{ 






Harper's ''Black and White" Series. 

Illustrated. 32mo, Cloth, 50 cents each. 



WHITTIER: NOTES OF HIS LIFE AND OF HIS 

FRIENDSHIPS. By ANNIE FIELDS. 
GILES COREY, YEOMAN. By MARY E. WiLKlNS. 
COFFEE AND REPARTEE. By JOHN KENDRICK BANGS. 
SEEN FROM THE SADDLE. By ISA CarrinGTON 

Cabell. 

A FAMILY CANOE TRIP. By FLORENCE WATTERS 
Snedeker. 

A LITTLE SWISS SOJOURN. By WILLIAM Dean 
HOWELLS. 

A LETTER OF INTRODUCTION. A Farce. By WiLLlAM 
Dean Howells. 

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. An Address. By George 
William Curtis. 

IN THE VESTIBULE LIMITED. By BrANDER MAT- 
THEWS. 

TJIE ALBANY DEPOT. A Farce. - By William Dean 
Howells. 



Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 

For sale by all booksellers, of luill be se7it by the publishers, 
postage prepaid, on receipt 0/ price. 



r^-3z/^S 



Copyright, 1893, by Harper & Brothers. 



All rights reserved. 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



JOHN G. WHITTIKK 

From a photograph taken in Juli/, 1S85 Frontispiece 

HOME AT AMESBURY Faces p. 6 

JOHN G. WHITTIER AT FORTY -FIVE YEARS OF AGE . "32 

WHITTIER IN HIS STUDY "42 

LAWN AT OAK KNOLL, DANVERS " 04 

THE HOUSE AT HAMPTON FALLS— WHITTIER ON 

THE BALCONY • • . " 72 

VIEW FROM WHITTIER 'S WINDOW, HAMPTON FALLS . "90 



"The poet of New Eugland. His genius 

drew its nourishment from her soil ; his pages i 

are a mirror of her outward nature^ and the j 

strong utterance of her inward life." ^ 

Francis Pakkman. l 

"We already see, and the future will see it 

more clearly, that no party ever did a vaster i 

work than his party; that he, like Hampden j 

and Milton, is a character not produced in i 

common times." E. C. Stedman. i 



WHITTIER 

NOTES OF HIS LIFE AND OF HIS FRIENDSHIPS 



The figure of the Quaker poet, as he 
stood before the world, was unlike that of 
any other prominent figure which has 
walked across the stage of life. This may 
be said, of course, of every individual ; yet 
the likenesses between men of a given era, 
or between modern men of strong charac- 
ter and those of the ancient world, cause us 
sometimes to exclaim with wonder at the 
evident repetitions in development. One 
can hardly walk through the galleries of 
antique statues, nor read the passages of 
Plutarch or Thucydides, without finding 
this idea thrust upon the mind. But with 
regard to Whittier, such comparisons were 



never made, even in fancy. His lithe, up- 
right form, full of quick movement, his 
burning eye, his keen wit, bore witness 
to a contrast in himself with the staid, 
controlled manner and the habit of the 
sect into which he was born. The love 
and devotion with which he adhered to 
the Quaker Church and doctrines served 
to accentuate his unlikeness to the men 
of his time, because he early became also 
one of the most determined contestants 
in one of the sternest combats which the 
world has witnessed. 

Neither in the ranks of poets nor divines 
nor philosophers do we find his counter- 
part. He felt a certain brotherhood with 
Eobert Burns, and early loved his genius; 
but where were two men more unlike ? 
A kind of solitude of life and experience, 
greater than that which usually throws 
its shadow on the human soul, invested 
him in his passage through the world. 
The refinement of his education, the calm 
of nature by which, in youth, he was sur- 



rounded, the few books which he made 
his own, nearly all serious in their char- 
acter, and the religious atmosphere in 
which he was nurtured, all tended to form 
an environment in which knowledge de- 
veloped into wisdom, and the fiery soul 
formed a power to restrain or to express 
its force for the good of humanity. 

But as surely as he was a Quaker, so 
surely also did he feel himself a part of 
the life of New England. He believed in 
the ideals of his time ; the simple ways of 
living; the eager nourishing of all good 
things b}'' the sacrifice of many private 
wishes ; in short, he made one cause with 
Garrison and Phillips, Emerson and Low- 
ell, Longfellow and Holmes. His stand- 
ards were often different from those of 
his friends, but their ideals were on the 
whole made in common. 

His friends were to Whittier, more than 
to most men, an unfailing source of daily 
happiness and gratitude. With the ad- 
vance of years, and the death of his un- 



married sister, his friends became all in | 
all to liim. They were his mother, his 

sister, and his brother ; but in a certain ] 

sense they were always friends of the I 
imagination. He saw some of them only 

at rare intervals, and sustained his rela- \ 

tions with them chiefly in his hurried j 
correspondence. He never suffered him- 
self to complain of what they were not; 
but what they were, in loyalty to chosen 

aims, and in their affection for him, was ] 

an unending source of pleasure. With - 

the shortcomings of others he dealt gen- '\ 

tly, having too many shortcomings of his ! 
own, as he was accustomed to say, with 

true humility. He did not, however, ; 

look upon the failings of his friends with • 

indifferent eyes. "How strange it is!" I 

he once said. "We see those whom we \ 

love going to the very verge of the preci- : 

pice of self-destruction, yet it is not in j 

our power to hold them back!" ■ 

A life of invalidism made consecutive ] 

labor of any kind an impossibility. For I 



years lie was only able to write for half 
an hour or less, without stopping to rest, 
and these precious moments were devoted 
to some poem or other work for the press, 
which was almost his only source of 
income. His letters suffered, from a lit- 
erary point of view; but they were none 
the less delightful to his friends; to the 
world of literature they are perhaps less 
important than those of most men who 
have achieved a high place. 

Whittier was between twenty and 
thirty years of age when his family left 
the little farm near Haverhill, where he 
was born, and moved into the town of 
Amesbury, eight miles distant. Long be- 
fore that period he had identified himself 
with the antislavery cause, and had visit- 
ed, in the course of his ceaseless labors 
for the slaves. New York, Philadelphia, 
and Washington. These brief journeys 
bounded his travels in this world. 

In the year 1843 he wrote anxiously to 



his publisher, Mr. Fields, "I send with 
this ' The Exiles,' a kind of John Gilpin 
legend. I am in doubt about it. Read it, 
and decide for thyself whether it is worth 
printing." 

He began at this rather late period (he 
was then thirty -six years old) to feel a 
touch of satisfaction in his comparatively 
new occupation of writing poetry, and to 
speak of it without reserve to his chosen 
friends. His poems were then beginning 
to bring him into personal relation with 
the reading world. Many years later, 
when speaking of the newspaper writing 
which absorbed his earlier life, he said 
that he had written a vast amount for the 
press; he thought that his work would 
fill nearly ten octavo volumes ; but he 
had grown utterly weary of throwing so 
much out into space from which no re- 
sponse ever came back to him. At length 
he decided to put it all aside, discovering 
that a power lay in him for more con- 
genial labors. 



From the moment of the publication 
of his second volume of poems, Whit- 
tier felt himself fairly launched upon a 
new career, and seemed to stand with a 
responsive audience before him. The 
poems "Toussaint L'Ouverture," "The 
Slave-ships," and others belonging to the 
same period, followed in quick succession. 
Sometimes they took the form of appeal, 
sometimes of sympathy, and again they 
are prophetic or dramatic. He hears the 
slave mother weep : 

"Gone — gone — sold and gone 
To the rice-swamp dank and lone, 
From Yirginia's hills and waters — 
Woe is me, my stolen daughters !" 

Such voices could not be silenced. 
Though men might turn away and re- 
fuse to read or to listen, the music once 
uttered rang out into the common air, 
and would not die. 

A homely native wit pointed Whittier's 
familiar correspondence. Writing in 1849, 



while revising his volume for publication, 
he speaks of one of his poems as " that 
rascally old ballad ' Kathleen,' " and adds 
that it '^ wants something, though it is al- 
ready too long." He adds: "The weather 
this morning is cold enough for an Es- 
quimau purgatory — terrible. What did 
the old Pilgrims mean by coming here?" 

With the years his friendship with his 
publisher became more intimate. In writ- 
ing him he often indulged his humor for 
fun and banter: ''Bachelor as I am, I 
congratulate thee on thy escape from 
single (misery!) blessedness. It is the 
very wisest thing thee ever did. Were 
I autocrat, I would see to it that every 
young man over twenty-five and every 
young woman over twenty was mar- 
ried without delay. Perhaps, on second 
thought, it might be well to keep one old 
maid and one old bachelor in each town, 
by way of warning, just as the Spartans 
did their drunken helots." 

Discussing the question of some of his 



"bad rhymes," and wliat to do about 
them, he wrote once: "I heartily thank 
thee for thy suggestions. Let me have 
more of them. I had a hearty laugh at 
thy hint of the 'carnal' bearing of one 
of my lines. It is now simply rural. I 
might have made some other needful 
changes had I not been suffering with 
headache all day." 

Occasionally the fire which burned in 
him would flame out, as when he writes 
in 1851: "So your Union-tinkers have 
really caught a ' nigger' at last! A very 
pretty and refreshing sight it must have 
been to Sabbath-going Christians yester- 
day — that chained court-house of yours. 
And Bunker Hill Monument looking 
down upon all ! But the matter is too 
sad for irony. God forgive the misera- 
ble politicians who gamble for office with 
dice loaded with human hearts !" 

From time to time, also, we find him 
expressing his literary opinions, eagerly 
and simply as friend may talk witli friend, 



and without aspiring to literary judgment. 
" Tboreau's 'Walden' is capital reading, 
but very wicked and heathenish. The 
practical moral of it seems to be that if 
a man is willing to sink himself into a 
woodchuck he can live as cheaply as that 
quadruped ; but, after all, for me, I prefer 
walking on two legs.'' 

It would be unjust to Whittier to quote 
this talk on paper as his final opinion 
upon Thoreau, for he afterwards read ev- 
erything he wrote, and was a warm ap- 
preciator of his work. 

His enthusiasm for books and for the 
writers of books never faded. "What 
do we not all owe you," he writes Mr. 
Fields, "for your edition of De Tocque- 
ville ! It is one of the best books of the 
century. Thanks, too, for Allingham's 
poems. After Tennyson, he is my favor- 
ite among modern British poets." 

And again: "I have just read Long- 
fellow's introduction to his ' Tales of 
the Inn' — a splendid piece of painting! 



Neither Boccaccio nor Cliaucer has done 
better. Who wrote 'A Loyal Woman's 
No V Was it Lucy Larcom? I thought 
it might be." 

In 1866 he says: " I am glad to see 'Ho- 
sea Biglow ' in book form. It is a grand 
book — the best of its kind for the last 
half-century or more. It has wit enough 
to make the reputation of a dozen Eng- 
lish satirists." 

This appreciation of his contempora- 
ries was a strong feature of his charac- 
ter. His sympathy with the difficulties 
of a literary life, particularly for women, 
was very keen. There seem to be few 
women writers of his time who have 
failed to receive from his pen some token 
of recognition. Of Edith Thomas he 
once said in one of his notelets, "She 
has a divine gift, and her first book is 
more than a promise — an assurance." Of 
Sarah Orne Jewett he was fond as of a 
daughter, and from their earliest ac- 
quaintance his letters are filled with ap- 



12 



preciation of her stories. ^' I do not 
wonder," he wrote one day, "that 'The 
Luck of the Bogans ' is attractive to the 
Irish folks, and to everybody else. It is 
a very successful departure from New 
England life and scenery, and shows that 
Sarah is as much at home in Ireland and 
on the Carolina Sea Islands as in Maine 
or Massachusetts. I am very proud that 
I was one of the first to discover her." 
This predisposition to think well of the 
work of others gave him the happy op- 
portunity in more than one instance of 
bringing authors of real talent before the 
public who might otherwise have waited 
long for general recognition. 

This was especially the case with one 
of our best beloved New England writers, 
Lucy Larcom. As early as 1853 he 
wrote a letter to his publisher intro- 
ducing her work to his notice. ''I en- 
close," he says, '' what I regard as a very 
unique and beautiful little book in MS. 
I don't wish thee to take my opinion, but 



13 



the first leisure hour thee have, read it, 
and I am sure thee will decide that it is 
exactly the thing for publication. . . . The 
little prose poems are unlike anj^thing in 
our literature, and remind me of the Ger- 
man writer Lessing. They are equally 
adapted to young and old. . . . The author, 
Lucy Larcom, of Beverly, is a novice in 
writing and book -making, and with no 
ambition to appear in print, and were I 
not perfectly certain that her little col- 
lection is worthy of type, I would be the 
last to encourage her to take even this 
small step to publicity. Eead ' The Im- 
pression of Eain-drops,' 'The Steamboat 
and Niagara,' 'The Laughing Water,' 
'My Father's House,' etc." 

He thus early became the foster-father 
of Lucy Larcom's children of the brain, 
and, what was far more to her, a life-long 
friend, adviser, and supporter. 

One of his most intimate personal 
friends for many years was Lydia Maria 
Child. Beginning in the earliest days of 



14 



the antislavery struggle, their friendship 
lasted into the late and peaceful sunset 
of their days. As Mrs. Child advanced 
in years, it was her custom in the winter 
to leave her cottage at Wayland for a 
few months and to take lodgings in Bos- 
ton. The dignity and independence of 
Mrs. Child's character were so great that 
she knew her friends would find her 
wherever she might live, and her desire 
to help on the good work of the world 
led her to practise the most austere econ- 
omies. Therefore, instead of finding a 
comfortable boarding - place, which she 
might well have excused herself for doing 
at her advanced age of eighty years, she 
took rooms in a very plain little house in 
a remote quarter of the city, and went by 
the street-cars daily to the north end, to 
get her dinner at a restaurant which she 
had discovered as being clean, and hav- 
ing wholesome food at the very lowest 
prices. This enabled her to give away 
sums which were surprisingly large to 



15 



those who knew her income. Wendell 
Phillips, who had always taken charge 
of her affairs, said to me at the time of 
her death that when the negroes made 
their flight into Kansas, Mrs. Child came 
in as soon as the news arrived and asked 
him to forward fifty dollars for their as- 
sistance. 

" I am afraid you cannot afford to send 
that sum just now," said Mr. Phillips. 
''Perhaps you will do well to think it 
over." 

''So I will," said Mrs. Child, and de- 
parted. 

In the course of the day he received a 
note from her, saying she had made a 
mistake. It was one hundred dollars 
that she wished to send. 

Mrs. Child's chief pleasure in coming 
to town was the opportunity she found 
of seeing her friends. Whittier always 
sought her out, and their meetings at the 
houses of their mutual cronies were fes- 
tivals indeed. They would sit side hy side, 



16 



while memories crowded up and filled 
their faces with a tenderness they could 
not express in words. As they told their 
tales and made merry, they would sit 
with their hands on each other's knees, 
and with glances in which tears and 
laughter were closely intermingled. 

'' It was good to see Mrs. Child," some 
one remarked, after one of those inter- 
views. 

''Yes," said Whittier, "Lyddy's bun- 
nets aren't always in the fashion " (with 
a quaint look, as much as to say, "I won- 
der what you think of anything so bad "), 
*'but we don't like her any the worse 
for that." 

Shortly after Mrs. Child's death he 
wrote from Amesbury: "My heart has 
been heavy ever since I heard of dear 
Maria Child's death. The true, noble, 
loving soul! Where is she? What is 
she ? How is she ? The moral and spir- 
itual economy of God will not suffer 
such light and love to be lost in blank 



17 



annihilation. She was herself an evi- 
dence of immortality. In a letter writ- 
ten to me at seventy years of age she 
said: 'The older I grow the more I am 
awe-struck (not frightened, hut awed) by 
the great mystery of an existence here 
and hereafter. No thinking can solve the 
problem. Infinite wisdom has purposely 
sealed it from our eyes.' " 

There was never a moment of Whit- 
tier's life when, prostrated by illness, or 
overwhelmed by private sorrows, or re- 
moved from the haunts of men, he forgot 
to take a living interest in public affairs, 
and to study closely the characteristics 
and works of the men who were our gov- 
ernors. He understood the characters of 
our public officers as if he had lived with 
them continually, and his quick appre- 
hension with regard to their movements 
was something most unusual. De Quin- 
cey, we remember, surprised his American 
friends by taking their hands, as it were, 
and showing them about Boston, so fa- 



18 



miliar was lie with our localities. Whit- 
tier could sit down with politicians, and 
easily prove himself the better man on 
contested questions. In 1861 he wrote: 

" Our government needs more wisdom 
than it has thus far had credit for to sus- 
tain the national honor and avert a war 
with England. What a pity that Welles 
indorsed the act of Wilkes in his report ! 
Why couldn't we have been satisfied 
with the thing without making such a 
cackling over it? Apologies are cheap, 
and we could afford to make a very hand- 
some one in this case. A war with Eng- 
land would ruin us. It is too monstrous 
to think of. May God in His mercy save 
us from it !" 

In 1862 and '63 Whittier was in fre- 
quent correspondence with Mr. Fields. 
Poems suggested by the stirring times 
were crowding thick upon his mind. 
*' It is a great thing to live in these days. 
I am thankful for what I have lived to 
see and hear," he says. '' There is noth- 



19 



ing for us but the old Methodist ejacula- 
tion, ' Glory to God !' " 

The volume entitled '* In War-time " ap- 
peared at this period, though, as usual, he 
seems to have had little strength and 
spirit for the revision of his poems. For 
this, however unwillingly, he would often 
throw himself upon the kindness of his 
friend and publisher. 

In writing to ask some consideration for 
the manuscript of an unknown lady dur- 
ing this year, he adds: " I ought to have 
sent to you about this lady's MS. long ago, 
but the fact is, I hate to bother you with 
such matters. I am more and more im- 
pressed with the Christian tolerance and 
patience of publishers, beset as you are 
with legions of clamorous authors, male 
and female. I should think you would 
hate the very sight of one of these import- 
unates. After all. Fields, let us own the 
^ truth : writing folks are bores. How few 
of us (let them say what they will of our 
genius) have any common-sense! I take 



it that it is the Providential business of 
authors and publishers to torment each 
other." 

These little friendly touches in his cor- 
respondence show us the man far more 
distinctly than many pages of writing* 
about him. Some one has said that Whit- 
tier's epistolary style was perfect. Doubt- 
less he could write as good a letter on oc- 
casion as any man who ever lived, but he 
sustained no such correspondence. His 
notes and letters were homely and affec- 
tionate, Avith the delightful carelessness 
possible in the talk of intimate friends. 
They present no ordinary picture of hu- 
man tenderness, devotion, and charity, 
and these qualities gain a wonderful beau- 
ty when we remember that they come 
from the same spirit which cried out with 
Eze}5:iel : 

''The burden of a prophet's power 
Fell on me in that fearful hour; 
From off unutterable woes 
The curtain of the future rose ; 



21 



I saw far down the coming time 

The fiery chastisement of crime ; 

With noise of mingling hosts, and jar 

Of falling towers and shouts of war, 

I saw the nations rise and fall 

Like fire-gleams on my tent's white wall," 

^' The fire and fury of the brain. " were 
his indeed; a spirit was in him to redeem 
the land ; he was one of God's interpret- 
ers ; but there was also the tenderness of 
divine humanity, the love and patience of 
those who dwell in the courts of the Lord. 

Whittier's sister Elizabeth was a sensi- 
tive woman, whose delicate health was a 
constant source of anxiety to her brother, 
especially after the death of their mother, 
when they were left alone together in 
the home at Amesbury. As one of their 
intimate friends said, no one could tell 
which would die first, but they were each 
so anxious about the other's health that 
it was a question which would wear away 
into the grave first, for the other's sake. 

It was Whittier's sad experience to 



22 



be deprived of the companion ship of all 
those most dear to him, and for over 
twenty years to live v^ithout that intimate 
household communion for the loss of 
which the world holds no recompense. 
For several years, before and after his 
sister Elizabeth's death, Whittier wore the 
look of one who was very ill. His large 
dark eyes burned with peculiar fire, and 
contrasted with his pale brow and attenu- 
ated figure. He had a sorrowful, stricken 
look, and found it hard enough to recon- 
struct his life, missing the companionship 
and carp of his sister, and her great sym- 
pathy with his own literary work. There 
was a likeness between the two ; the same 
speaking eyes marked the line from which 
they sprang, and their kinship and inher- 
itance. Old New England people were 
quick to recognize "the Batchelder eyes," 
not only in the Whittiers, but in Daniel 
Webster, Caleb Gushing, Nathaniel Haw- 
thorne, and William Batchelder Greene, 
a man less widely known than these dis- 



23 



tinguished compatriots. Mr. Greene was, 
however, a man of mark in liis own time, 
a daring thinker, and one who was pos- 
sessed of much hrave originality, whose 
own deep thoughtfulness was always 
planting seeds of thought in others, and 
who can certainly never be forgotten by 
those who were fortunate enough to be 
his friends. 

These men of the grand eyes were all 
descended from a gifted old preacher of 
great fame in early colonial days, a man 
of true distinction and devoted service, in 
spite of the dishonor with which he let 
his name be shadowed in his latest years. 
It would be most interesting to trace the 
line still further back into the past, but 
when the Batch elder eyes were by any 
chance referred to in Whittier's presence, 
he would look shyly askance, and some- 
times speak, half with pride, half with a 
sort of humorous compassion, of his Hamp- 
ton ancestor. The connection of the 
Whittiers of Haverhill with the Greenes 



was somewliat closer than witli other 
branches of the Batchelder line. One 
of the poet's most entertaining reminis- 
cences of his boyhood was the story of his 
first visit to Boston. Mr. William Greene's 
mother was an interesting woman of 
strong, independent character and wide 
interests, wonted to the life of cities, and 
one of the first, in spite of his boyish shy- 
ness, to appreciate her young relative. 
Her kind eagerness, during one of her 
occasional visits to the Whittiers, that 
Greenleaf should come to see her when 
he came to Boston, fell in with his own 
dreams, and a high desire to see the sights 
of the great town. 

One can easily imagine how his imag- 
ination must have glorified the natural 
expectations of a country boy, and when 
the time arrived, how the whole house- 
hold lent itself to furthering so great an 
expedition. He was not only to have a 
new suit of clothes, but they were, for the 
first time, to be trimmed with " bo ugh ten 



25 



buttons," to the lad's complete satisfac- 
tion, his mind being fixed upon those as 
marking the difference between town and 
country fashions. When the prepara- 
tions were made, his fresh homespun cos- 
tume, cut after the best usage of the So- 
ciety of Friends, seemed to him all that 
heart could desire, and he started away 
bravely by the coach to pass a week in 
Boston. His mother had not forgotten to 
warn him of possible dangers and snares ; 
it was then that he made her a promise 
which, at first from principle and later 
from sentiment, he always most sacredly 
kept — that he would not enter a play- 
house. As he told the story, it was easy 
for a listener to comprehend how many 
good wishes flew after the adventurer, 
and how much wild beating of the heart 
he himself experienced as the coach rolled 
away; how bewildering the city streets 
appeared when he found himself at the 
brief journey's end. After he had re- 
ported himself to Mrs. Greene, and been 



26 



received with most affectionate hospitali- 
ty, and had promised to reappear at tea- 
time, he sallied forth to the great business 
of sight-seeing. 

"I wandered up and down the streets," 
he used to say. "Somehow it wasn't 
just what I expected, and the crowd was 
worse and worse after I got into Wash- 
ington Street; and when I got tired of 
being jostled, it seemed to me as if the 
folks might get by if I waited a little 
while. Some of them looked at me, and 
so I stepped into an alleyway and waited 
and looked out. Sometimes there didn't 
seem to be so many passing, and I thought 
of starting, and then they'd begin again. 
'Twas a terrible stream of people to me. 
I began to think my new clothes and the 
buttons were all thrown away. I stayed 
there a good while." (This was said with 
great amusement.) " I began to be home- 
sick. I thought it made no difference at 
all about my having those boughten but- 
tons." 



How long lie waited, or what great 
thoughts may have come from this first 
glimpse at the ceaseless procession of hu- 
manity, who can say? But there was a 
sequel to the tale. He was invited to re- 
turn to Mrs. Greene's to drink tea and 
meet a company of her guests. Among 
them were some ladies who were very 
gay and friendly; we can imagine that 
they were attracted by the handsome eyes 
and quaint garb of the young Friend, and 
by his quick wit and homely turns of 
speech, all the more amusing for a rustic 
flavor. They tried to tease him a little, 
but they must have quickly found their 
match in drollery, while the lad was al- 
ready a citizen of the commonwealth of 
books. No doubt the stimulus of such a 
social occasion brought him, as well as 
the strangers, into new acquaintance with 
his growing gifts. But presently one of 
the ladies, evidently the favorite until 
this shocking moment, began to speak of 
the theatre, and asked for the pleasure of 



2S 



his presence at the play that very night, 
she herself being the leading p]a5^er. At 
this disclosure, and the frank talk of the 
rest of the company, their evident interest 
in the stage, and regard for a young per- 
son who had chosen such a profession, the 
young Quaker lad was stricken with hor- 
ror. In after-years he could only remem- 
ber it with amusement, but that night 
his mother's anxious warnings rang in his 
ears, and he hastened to escape from such 
a snare. Somehow this pleasant young 
companion of the tea-party hardly repre- 
sented the wickedness of playhouses as 
Puritan New England loved to picture 
them; but between a sense of disappoint- 
ment and homesickness and general in- 
security, he could not sleep, and next 
morning when the early stage-coach start- 
ed forth, it carried him as passenger. He 
said nothing to his amazed family of the 
alarming episode of the playing-woman, 
nor of his deep consciousness of the home- 
made clothes, but he no doubt reflected 



much upon this Boston visit in the leisure 
of the silent fields and hills. 

It is impossible to convey to those who 
never saw Mr. Whittier, the charm of his 
gift of story -telling; the exactness and 
simplicity of his reminiscences were fla- 
vored by his poetical insight and dramatic 
representation. It was a wonderful thing 
to hear him rehearse in the twilight the 
scenes of his youth, and the figures that 
came and went in that small world ; the 
pathos and humor of his speech can never 
be exceeded ; and there can never be again 
so complete a linking of the ancient pro- 
vincial lore and the new life and thought of 
New England as there was in him. While 
he was with us, his poems seemed hardly 
to give sufficient witness of that rich store 
of thought and knowledge; he was al- 
ways making his horizon wider, at the 
same time that he came into closer sym- 
pathy with things near at hand. For him 
the ancient customs of a country neigh- 
borhood, the simple characters, the loves 



30 



and hates and losses of a rural household, 
stood for a type of human life in every 
age, and were never trivial or narrow. 
As he grew older, these became less and less 
personal. He sometimes appeared to think 
of death rather than the person who had 
died, and of love and grief rather than of 
those who felt their influence. His was 
the life of the poet first of all, and yet the 
tale of his sympathetic friendliness, and 
his generosities and care-taking for others, 
will never be fully told. The dark eyes 
had great powers of insight; they could 
flash scorn as well as shine with the soft 
light of encouragement. 

He accustomed himself, of course, to 
more frequent visits to Boston after his 
sister's death, but he was seldom, if ever, 
persuaded to go to the Saturday Club, to 
which so many of his friends belonged. 
Sometimes he would bring a new poem 
for a private first reading, and for that 
purpose would stay to breakfast or lunch- 



eon; but late dinners were contrary to 
the habit of his life, and he seldom sat 
down to one. 

^^ I take the liberty," he wrote one day, 
*' of enclosing a little poem of mine which 
has beguiled some weary hours. I hope 
thee will like it. How strange it seems 
not to read it to my sister ! If thee have 
read Schoolcraft, thee will remember what 
he says of the 'Little Yanishers.' The 
legend is very beautiful, and I hope I 
have done it justice in some sort." 

In the spring of 1865 he came to Camp- 
ton, on the Pemigewasset River, in New 
Hampshire, a delightful place for those 
who love green hills and the mystery 
of rivers. 

We were passing a few weeks there by 
ourselves, and it was a great surprise and 
pleasure to see our friend. He drove up 
to the door one afternoon just as the sun 
was slanting to the west, too late to drive 
away again that day. In our desire to 
show him all the glories of the spot, we 



32 



carried liim out at once, up the hill-side, 
leaping across the brook, gathering penny- 
royal and Indian posy as we went, past 
the sheep and on and up, until he, laugh- 
ing, said : ^ ' Look here, I can't follow thee ; 
besides, I think I've seen more of this life 
than thee have, and it isn't all so new to 
me ! Come and sit down here ; I'm tired. " 
We sat a while overlooking the wonder- 
ful panorama, the winding river, the hills 
and fields all green and radiant, listening 
at times to a mountain stream which came 
with wild and solitary roar from its sol- 
emn home among the farther heights. 
Presently we returned to supper ; and af- 
terwards, sitting in the little parlor which 
looked to wards the sunset on the high hills 
far away, his mind seemed to rise also into 
a higher atmosphere. He began by quot- 
ing the last verse of Emerson's " Sphinx :" 

" Uprose the merry Sphinx, 

And couched no more in stone; 
She melted into purple cloud, 
She silvered in the moon ; 




JOHN G. WHITTIER 

At forty - five years of age 



33 

She spired into a yellow flame; 

She flowered in blossoms red; 
She flowed into a foaming wave ; 

She stood Monadnock's head." 

He talked long and earnestly upon the 
subject of our spiritual existence inde- 
pendent of the body. I have often heard 
him dwell upon this subject since; but 
the awful g'lory of the hills, the dark and 
silence of our little parlor, the assured 
speech touching the unseen, of one who 
had thought much and suffered much, 
and found a refuge in the tabernacle not 
made with hands, were very impressive. 
We felt that "it was good for us to be 
there." 

Speaking of his faith in the visions 
of others — though he did not have these 
visions himself, and believed they were 
not vouchsafed to all — he told us of a 
prophecy that was written down twenty- 
five years before by an old man in Sand- 
wich (a village among the hills, about 
fifteen miles from Campton), predicting 



tlie terrible civil war which had just been 
raging between the North and the South. 
This man was in the fields at noonday, 
when a darkness fell upon his sight and 
covered the earth. He beheld the divid- 
ed nation and the freed people and the 
final deliverance from the terrors of war. 
The whole series of events were clearly de- 
tailed, and Whittier had stored them away 
in his memory. He said that only one 
thing was wrong. He foretold foreign 
intervention, from which we were happi- 
ly spared. The daughter of this prophet 
was living; he knew her /well — an excel- 
lent woman and a Friend who was often 
impressed to speak in meeting. "She is 
good," said Whittier, "and speaks from 
her experience, and for that reason I like 
to hear her." 

Spiritualism, as it is called in our day, 
was a subject which earnestly and steadi- 
ly held his attention. Having lived very 
near to the Salem witchcraft experience 
in early times, the topic was one that 



35 



came more closely home to his mind than 
to almost any one else in our century. 
There are many passages in his letters on 
this question which state his own mental 
position very clearly. 

*' I have had as good a chance to see a 
ghost," he once said, '^as anybody ever 
had, but not the slightest sign ever came 
to me. I do not doubt what others tell 
me, but I sometimes wonder over my own 
incapacity. I should like to see some 
dear ghost walk in and sit down by me 
when I am here alone. The doings of 
the old witch days have never been ex- 
plained, and, as we are so soon to be trans- 
ferred to another state, how natural it 
appears that some of us should have 
glimpses of it here! We all feel the 
help we receive from the Divine Spirit. 
Why deny, then, that some men have 
it more directly and more visibly than 
others?" 

In his memories of New England coun- 
try life when he was a child this subject 



36 



was closely interwoven with every asso- 
ciation. He had an uncle, who made one 
of the family, a man by no means devoid 
of the old-fashioned faith in witches, and 
who was always ready to give his testi- 
mony. He remembered an old woman 
in the neighborhood who was accused of 
being a witch, and that when his uncle's 
opinion was asked about her, he replied 
that he hnew she ivas a witch. 
*' How do you know ?" they said. 
*^ Oh," he replied, "IVe seen her!" 
Whittier recalled this uncle's returning 
one night from a long drive through the 
woods; and when he came in and sat 
down by the fire after supper, he told 
them that he had seen three old women in 
a clearing around a kettle, *'a-stirrin' of 
it." When they saw him, they moved 
off behind the trees, but he distinctly saw 
the smoke from the kettle, and he recog- 
nized the old woman in question as one 
of the three beyond the shadow of a 
doubt. No doubt some curious rustic 



31 



remedy or cliarm was being brewed in 
the dark of the moon. Nothing escaped 
his observation that was printed or circu- 
lated upon this topic. In the summer of 
1882 he discovered that Old Orchard 
Beach had been made a theatre of new 

wonders. Dr. had been there, 

'^ working Protestant miracles, and the 
lame walk and the deaf hear under his 
manipulation and holy oil. There seems 
no doubt that cures of nervous diseases 
are really sometimes effected, and I be- 
lieve in the efficacy of prayer. The near- 
er we are drawn to Him who is the source 
of all life, the better it must be for soul 
and body." 

In Robert Dale Owen he always took a 
strong and friendly interest; and when, 
late in life, reverses fell upon him in the 
shape of humiliating revelations of his 
own credulity, Whittier's relations to him 
were unchanged. *^ I have read with re- 
newed interest," he wrote, ^*the paper of 
R. D. Owen. I had a long talk with him 



38 



years ago on the subject. He was a very 
noble and good man, and I was terribly 
indignant when he was so deceived by the 
pretended materialized * Katie King.' I 
could never quite believe in 'materializa- 
tion,' as I had reason to know that much 
of it was fraudulent. It surely argues a 
fathomless depth of depravity to trifle 
with the yearning love of those who have 
lost dear ones, and 'long for the touch 
of a vanished hand.' " 

In the year 1866 a very fine portrait of 
Abraham Lincoln was engraved by Mar- 
shall. A copy of it was presented to 
Whittier, who wrote concerning it: "It 
was never my privilege to know Abraham 
Lincoln personally, and the various pict- 
ures have more or less failed to satisfy my 
conception of him. They might be, and 
probably were, what are called ' good like- 
nesses,' so far as outline and detail were 
concerned ; but to me they always seemed 
to lack one great essential of a true por- 



39 



trait — the informing' spirit of the man 
within. This I find in Marshall's por- 
trait. The old harsh lines and unmis- 
takable mouth are there, without flattery 
or compromise; but over all and through 
all the pathetic sadness, the wise simplic- 
ity and tender humanity of the man are 
visible. It is the face of the speaker at 
Gettysburg, and the writer of the second 
inaugural." 

It was during this year, also, that the 
^'Tent on the Beach" was written. He 
had said again and again in his notes 
that he had this work in hand, but al- 
ways declared he was far too ill to finish 
it during the year. Nevertheless, in the 
last days of December the package was 
forwarded to his publisher. "Tell me," 
he wrote, * ' if thee object to the personal 
character of it. I have represented thee 
and Bayard Taylor and myself living a 
wild tent life for a few summer days on 
the beach, where, for lack of something 
better, I read my stories to the others. 



My original plan was the old ' Decameron ' 
one, each personage to read his own 
poems; but the thing has been so hack- 
neyed by repetition that I abandoned it in 
disgust, and began anew. The result is 
before thee. Put it in type or the fire. 
I am content — like Eugene Aram, * pre- 
pared for either fortune.' " 

He had intended also to accomplish 
some work in prose at this period, but 
the painful condition of his health for- 
bade it. *'I am forbidden to use my 
poor head," he said, "so I have to get 
along as I can without it. The Catholic 
St. Leon, thee knows, walked alert as 
usual after his head was cut off." 

I am tempted to quote still further 
from a letter of this period: " I enclose a 
poem of mine w^hich has never seen the 
light, although it was partly in print from 
my first draft to spare me the trouble of 
copying. It presents my view of Christ 
as the special manifestation of the love of 
God to humanity. . . . Let me thank the 



publisher of Milton's prose for the com- 
pliment of the dedication. Milton's prose 
has long been my favorite reading. My 
whole life has felt the influence of his 
writings." 

There is a delightful note on the subject 
of the popularity of the ' ' Tent on the 
Beach," which shows his natural pleasure 
in success. * ' Think, " he says, ' ' of bagging 
in this tent of ours an unsuspecting public 
at the rate of a thousand a day! This 
will never do. The swindle is awful. 
Barnum is a saint to us. I am bowed 
with a sense of guilt, ashamed to look an 
honest man in the face. But Nemesis is 
on our track; somebody will puncture our 
tent yet, and it will collapse like a torn 
balloon. I know I shall have to catch 
it; my back tingles in anticipation." 

It was perhaps in this same year, 1866, 
that we made an autumn visit to Whit- 
tier, which is still a well - remembered 
pleasure. The weather was warm and 



the fruit was ripening in tlie little Ames- 
bury garden. We loitered about for a 
while, I remember, in the afternoon, 
among the falling pear leaves and in the 
sweet air, but he soon led the way into 
his garden-room, and fell into talk. He 
was an adept in the art of conversation, 
having trained himself in the difficult 
school of a New England farm-house, tit 
ground for such athletics, being typically 
bare of suggestion and of relief from out- 
side resources. The unbroken afternoons 
and the long evenings, when the only 
hope of entertainment is in such fire as 
one brain can strike from another, pro- 
duce a situation as difficult to the un- 
skilled as that of an untaught swimmer 
when first cast into the sea. Persons 
long habituated to these contests could 
face the position calmly, and see the early 
"tea-things" disappear and the contest- 
ants draw their chairs around the fire 
with a kind of zeal; but to one new to 
such experience there was room for heart- 



43 



sinkings when preparations were made, 
by putting fresh sticks on the fire, for sit- 
ting from gloaming to vespers, and some- 
times on again unwearied till midnight. 

Mrs. Stowe and Whittier were the in- 
vincible Lancelots of these tourneys, and 
any one who has had the privilege of sit- 
ting by the New England hearth-stone 
with either of them will be ready to con- 
fess that no playhouse, or game, or any 
of the distractions the city may afford, 
can compare with the satisfaction of such 
an experience. Upon the visit in ques- 
tion Whittier talked of the days of his 
antislavery life in 1835 or '36, when the 
English agitator, George Thompson, first 
came to this country. The latter was 
suft'ering from the attack of many a mob, 
and was fatigued by frequent speaking 
and as frequent abuse. Whittier invited 
him to his home in the neighborhood of 
Haverhill, where he could find quiet and 
rest during the warm weather. Thomp- 
son accepted the invitation, and remained 



44 



with liim a fortiiiglit. Tliey used to rake 
hay together, and go about the farm un- 
molested. At length, however, a press- 
ing invitation came for Thompson to go 
to Concord, New Hampshire, to speak in 
the cause of freedom, and afterwards to 
continue on to the village of Plymouth 
and visit a friend in that place. Whittier 
was included in the invitation, and it 
was settled that they should accept the 
call. They travelled peaceably enough, 
in their own chaise, as far as Concord, 
where the speech was delivered without 
interruption; but when they attempted 
to leave the hall after the address was 
ended, they found it almost impossible. 
A crowd followed them with the appar- 
ent intention of stoning and killing them. 
" I understood how St. Paul felt when he 
was thrice stoned," said Whittier. The 
missiles fell around them and upon them 
like hail, not touching their heads, provi- 
dentially, although he could still remem- 
ber the sound of the stones w^^hen they 



45 



missed their aim and struck the wooden 
fence behind them. They were made 
very lame by the blows, but they man- 
aged to reach their friend's house, where 
they sprang up the steps three at a time, 
before the crowd knew where they were 
going-. Their host was certainly a brave 
man, for he met them at the door, and 
throwing it open, exclaimed, "Whoever 
comes in here must come over my dead 
body." The door was then barricaded, 
and the crowd rushed round to the back 
of the house, thinking that their victims 
intended to go out that way ; but the travel- 
lers waited until it was dark, when Whit- 
tier exchanged his friend's hat for that of 
his host, and anything else peculiar about 
his dress being well disguised, the two 
managed to pass out unperceived by the 
crowd, and go on their way to Plymouth. 
They stopped one night on their journey 
at a small inn, where the landlord asked 
if they had heard anything of the riot in 
Concord. Two men had been there, he 



said, one an Englishman by the name of 
Thompson, who had been making abom- 
inable and seditious speeches, stirring up 
people about "the niggers;" the other 
was a young Quaker by the name of 
Whittier, who was always making speech- 
es. He heard him lecture once himself, 
he said (a base lie, Whittier told us, be- 
cause he had never "lectured" in his 
life), and it was well that active measures 
had been taken against them. *'We 
heard him all through," said Whittier, 
" and then, just as I had my foot on the 
step of the chaise, ready to drive away 
from the door, I remarked to him, 
* Wouldn't you like to see that Thompson 
of whom you have been speaking?' I 
took good care not to use * plain ' lan- 
guage (that is, the Quaker form). ^I 
rather think I should,' said the man. 
^Well, this is Mr. Thompson,' I said, as 
I jumped into the chaise. * And this is 
the Quaker, Whittier,' said Thompson, 
driving away as fast as he could. I 



47 



looked back, and saw him standing, 
mouth wide open, gazing after us in the 
greatest astonishment." 

The two kept on to Plymouth, where 
they were nearly mobbed a second time. 
Years after, Whittier said that once when 
he was passing through Portland, a man, 
seeing him go by, stepped out of his shop 
and asked if his name were Whittier, and 
if he were not the man who was stoned, 
years before, by a mob at Concord. The 
answer being in the affirmative, he said 
he believed a devil possessed him that 
night; for he had no reason to wish evil 
either to Whittier or Thompson, yet he 
was filled with a desire to kill them, and 
he thought he should have done so if 
they had not escaped. He added that the 
mob was like a crowd of demons, and he 
knew one man who had mixed a black 
dye to dip them in, which would be almost 
impossible to get off. He could not ex- 
plain to himself or to another the state of 
mind he was in. 



48 



The next morning we walked with 
Whit tier again in his little garden, and 
saw his grapes, which were a source of 
pride and pleasure. One vine, he told us, 
came up from a tiny rootlet sent to him by 
Charles Sumner, in a letter from Wash- 
ington. 

Later we strolled forth into the village 
street as far as the Friends' meeting- 
house, and sat down upon the steps while 
he told us something of his neighbors. 
He himself, he said, had planted the trees 
about the church: they were then good- 
sized trees. He spoke very earnestly 
about the worship of the Friends. All 
the associations of his youth and all the 
canons of his education and development 
were grounded on the Friends' faith and ^ 
doctrine, and he was anxious that they 
should show a growth commensurate with 
the age. He disliked many of the inno- 
vations, but his affectionate spirit clung 
to his people, and he longed to see them 
drawing to themselves a larger measure 



49 



of spiritual life, day by day. He loved 
the old custom of sitting in silence, and 
hoped they would not stray away into 
habits of much speaking. The old habits 
of the meeting-house were very dear to 
him. 

One cold, clear morning in January I 
heard his early ring. He had been ill, 
but was so much better that he was abso- 
lutely gay. He insisted upon blowing 
the fire, which, as sometimes happens, 
will struggle to do its worst on the coldest 
days ; and as the flames at last began to 
roar, his spirits rose with them. He was 
rejoicing over Garibaldi's victory. The 
sufferings of Italy had been so terrible 
that even one small victory in their be- 
half seemed a great gain. He said that 
he had been trying to arouse the interest 
of the Friends, but it usually took about 
two years to thoroughly awaken them 
on any great topic ! 

He remained several hours that morn- 

4 



50 



ing talking over his hopes for the coun- 
try — of politics, of Charles Sumner, of 
whom he said, " Sumner is always funda- 
mentally right;" and of John Bright, for 
whose great gifts he had sincere admira- 
tion. Soon afterwards, at the time of this 
great man's death, Whittier wrote to us : 
''Spring is here to-day, warm, hirdfull. . . . 
It seems strange that I am alive to wel- 
come her when so many have passed away 
with the winter, and among them that 
stalwartest of Englishmen, John Bright, 
sleeping now in the daisied grounds of 
Rochdale, never more to move the world 
with his surpassing eloquence. How I 
regret that I have never seen him ! We 
had much in common in our religious 
faith, our hatred of war and oppression. 
His great genius seemed to me to be al- 
ways held firmly in hand by a sense of 
duty, and by the practical common-sense 
of a shrewd man of business. He fought 
through life like an old knight -errant, 
but without enthusiasm. He had no per- 



51 



sonal ideals. I remember once how he 
remonstrated with me for my admiration 
for General Gordon. He looked upon that 
wonderful personality as a wild fighter, a 
rash adventurer, doing evil that good 
might come. He could not see him as I 
saw him, giving his life for humanity, 
alone and unfriended, in that dreadful 
Soudan. He did not like the idea of fight- 
ing Satan with Satan's weapons. Lord 
Salisbury said truly that John Bright was 
the greatest orator England had produced, 
and his eloquence was only called out by 
what he regarded as the voice of God in 
his soul." 

When at length Whittier rose to go that 
winter morning, with the feeling that he 
had already taken too large a piece out of 
the day, we pressed him to stay longer, 
since it was already late. "Why can't 
you stay?" urged his host. ** Because, I 
tell you, I don't want to," which set us 
all laughing, and settled the question. 

Our first knowledge of his arrival in 



town was usually that early and punctual 
ring to which I have referred. He would" 
come in looking pale and thin, but full of 
fire, and, as we would soon find, of a certain 
vigor. He became interested one morn- 
ing in a plan proposed to him for making 
a collection of poems for young people, 
one which he finally completed with the 
aid of Miss Lucy Larcom. We got down 
from the shelf Longfellow's "Poets and 
Poetry of Europe, " and looked it over to- 
gether. "Annie of Tharaw " was a great 
favorite of his, and the poem by Dirk 
Smit, on " The Death of an Infant," found 
his ready appreciation. Whittier easily 
fell from these into talk of Burns, who 
was his master and ideal. ^ ' He lives, 
next to Shakespeare," he said, "in the 
heart of humanity." 

In speaking of Eossetti and of his bal- 
lad of "Sister Helen," he confessed to 
being strangely attracted to this poem, 
because he could remember seeing his 
mother, " who was as good a woman as 



53 



ever lived," and his aunt, performing the 
same strange act of melting a waxen fig- 
ure of a clergyman of their time. 

The solemnity of the affair made a deep 
impression on his mind, as a child, for the 
death of the clergyman in question was 
confidently expected. His "heresies" 
had led him to experience this cabalistic 
treatment. 

There was some talk, also, that morn- 
ing of the advantages, in these restless 
days, accruing to those who "stay put" 
in this world, instead of to those who 
are forever beating about, searching for 
greater opportunities from positioner cir- 
cumstance. He laughed heartily over 
the tale, which had just then reached us, 
of Carlyle going to hunt up a new resi- 
dence in London with a map of the world 
in his pocket. 

We asked Whittier if he never felt 
tempted to go to Quebec from his well- 
beloved haunts in the White Mountains. 
"Oh no," he replied. "I know it all by 



54 



books and pictures just as well as if I had 
seen it." 

This talk of travelling reminded him 
of a circus which came one season to 
Amesbury. ^'I was in my garden," he 
said, *'when I saw an Arab wander down 
the street, and by-and-by stop and lean 
against my gate. He held a small book 
in his hand, which he was reading from 
time to time when he was not occupied 
with gazing about him. Presently I 
went to talk with him, and found he had 
lived all his life on the edge of the Desert 
until he had started for America. He 
was very homesick, and longed for the 
time of his return. He had hired him- 
self for a term of years to the master of 
the circus. He held the Koran in his 
hand, and was delighted to find a friend 
who had also read his sacred book. He 
opened his heart still further then, and 
said how he longed for his old, wild life 
in the Desert, for a sight of the palms, 
and the sands, but, above all, for its free- 



55 



dom." This interview made a deep im- 
pression, naturally, upon WLittier's mind, 
he, who was no traveller himself, having 
thus sung : 

" He who wanders widest, lifts 
No more of beauty's jealous veil 
Than he who from his doorway sees 
The miracle of flowers and trees." 

The memory of a visit to Amesbury, 
made once in September, vividly remains 
with me. It v^as early in the month, 
when the lingering heat of summer seems 
sometimes to gather fresh intensity from 
the fact that we are so soon to hear the 
winds of autumn. Amesbury had greatly 
altered of late years; ''large enough to 
be a city," our friend declared; "but I 
am not fat enough to be an alderman." 
To us it was still a small village, though 
somewhat dustier and less attractive than 
when we first knew it. 

As we approached the house, we saw 
him from a distance characteristically 



56 



gazing down the road for us, from his 
front yard, and then at the first glimpse 
suddenly disappearing, to come forth 
again to meet us, quite fresh and quiet, 
from his front door. It had heen a very 
hot, dry summer, and everything ahout 
that place, as about every other, was parch- 
ed and covered with dust. There had 
been no rain for weeks, and the village 
street was then quite innocent of water- 
ing-carts. The fruit hung heavily from 
the nearly leafless trees, and the soft thud 
of the pears and apples as they fell to the 
ground could be heard on every side in 
the quiet house-yards. The sun strug- 
gled feebly through the mists during the 
noontide hours, when a still heat per- 
vaded rather than struck the earth; and 
then in the early afternoon, and late into 
the next morning, a stirless cloud seemed 
to cover the face of the w^orld. These 
mists were much increased by the burn- 
ing of peat and brush, and, alas! of the 
very woods themselv^es, in every direc- 



tion. Altogether, as Whittier said, quaint- 
ly, ^'it was very encourag'ing' weather 
for the Millerites.'' 

His niece, who hears the name of his 
beloved sister, was then the mistress of 
his home, and we were soon made heart- 
ily welcome inside the house, where every- 
thing was plain and neat as became a 
Friend's household; but as the village 
had grown to be a stirring place, and the 
house stood close upon the dusty road, 
such charming neatness must sometimes 
have been a difficult achievement. The 
noonday meal was soon served and soon 
ended, and then we sat down behind the 
half-closed blinds, looking out upon the 
garden, the faded vines, and almost leaf- 
less trees. It was a cosey room, with its 
Franklin-stove, at this season surmounted 
by a bouquet, and a table between the 
windows, where was a larger bouquet, 
which Whittier himself had gathered that 
morning in anticipation of our arrival. 
He seemed briorhter and better than we 



had dared to hope, and was in excellent 
mood for talking. Referring again to the 
Millerites, who had been so reanimated 
by the forest fires, he said he had been 
deeply impressed lately with their deplor- 
able doctrines. ' ' Continually disappointed 
because we don't all burn up on a sudden, 
they forget to be thankful for their pres- 
ervation from the dire fate they predict 
with so much complacency." 

He had just received a proof of his poem 
^' Miriam," with the introduction, and he 
could not be content until they had both 
been read aloud to him. After the read- 
ing they were duly commented upon, and 
revised until he thought he could do no 
more ; yet twice before our departure the 
proofs were taken out of the hand-bag 
where they were safely stowed away, and 
again more or less altered. 

Whittier's ever-growing fame was not 
takers by him as a nqatter of course. " I 
cannot think very well of my own things, " 
he us.ed to say; '^ and what is raere fame 



wortli when thee is at home, alone, and 
sick with, headaches, unable either to read 
or to write V Nevertheless, he derived 
very great pleasure and consolation from 
the letters and tributes which poured in 
upon him from hearts he had touched or 
lives he had quickened. '' That I like," 
he would say sometimes; " that is wortli 
having." But he must often have known 
the deeps of sadness in winter evenings 
when he was too ill to touch book or 
pen, and when he could do nothing dur- 
ing the long hours but sit and think over 
the fire. 

We slept in Elizabeth's chamber. The 
portrait of their mother, framed in autumn 
leaves gathered in the last autumn of her 
life, hung upon the wall. Here, too, as 
in our bedroom at Dickens's, the diary of 
Pepys lay on the table. Dickens had 
read his copy faithfully, and written notes 
therein. Of this copy the leaves had not 
been cut; but with it lay the ^' Prayers of 
the Ages," and volumes of poems, which 



60 



had all been well read, and '' Pickwick " 
upon the top. 

In the year 1867 Charles Dickens came 
to America to give his famous Readings. 
Whittier, as we have seen, was seldom 
tempted out of his country home and 
habitual ways, but Dickens was for one 
moment too much for him. To our sur- 
prise, he wrote to ask if he could possibly 
get a seat to hear him. *' I see there is a 
crazy rush for tickets." A favorable an- 
swer was despatched to him as soon as 
practicable, but he had already repented 
of the indiscretion. "My dear Fields," 
he wrote, "up to the last moment I have 
hoped to occupy the seat so kindly prom- 
ised me for this evening. But I find I 
must give it up. Gladden with it the 
heart of some poor wretch who dangled 
and shivered all in vain in your long 
queue the other morning. I must read 
my 'Pickwick' alone, as the Marchioness 
played cribbage. I should so like, never- 



61 



theless, to see Dickens, and shake that 
creative hand of his ! It is as well, doubt- 
less, so far as he is concerned, that I can- 
not do it; he will have enough and too 
much of that, I fear. I dreamed last 
night I saw him surrounded by a mob of 
ladies, each with her scissors snipping at 
his hair, and he seemed in a fair way to 
be * shaven and shorn,' like the Priest in 
*The House that Jack Built' " 

The large events of humanity were to 
Whittier a portion of his own experience, 
his personal life being, in the ordinary 
sense, devoid of incident. The death of 
Charles Dickens, in 1871, was a personal 
loss, just as his life had been a living gain 
to this remote and invalid man. One 
long quiet summer afternoon shortly after, 
Whittier joined us for the sake of talking 
about Dickens. He told us what sunshine 
came from him into his own solemn and 
silent country life, and what grateful love 
he must ever bear to him. He wished to 
hear all that could be told of him as a 



man. Tea came, and the sun went down, 
and still he talked and questioned, and 
then, after a long silence, he said, sudden- 
ly: ''What's he doing now ? Sometimes 
I say, in Shakespeare's phrase, O for 
some 'courteous ghost,' hut nothing ever 
comes to me. He was so human I should 
think thee must see him sometimes. It 
seems as if he were the very person to 
manifest himself and give us a glimpse 
beyond. I believe I have faith; I some- 
times think I have ; but this desire to see 
just a little way is terribly strong in me. 
I have expressed something of it in my 
verses to Mrs. Child about Loring." 

He spoke also of the significance of our 
prayers ; of their deep value to our spirit 
in constantly renewing the sense of de- 
pendence : and further, since we "surely 
find that our prayers are answered, what 
blindness and fatuity there is in neglect 
or abuse of our privilege !" 

He was thinking of editing a new edi- 
tion of John Woolman. He hoped to 



63 



induce certain people who would read his 
own books, to read that, by writing a 
preface for it. 

The death of Henry Ward Beecher was 
also a loss and a sadness to him in his 
solitary life. '' I am saddened by the 
death of Beecher," he wrote; *'he was 
so strong, so generous, so warm-hearted, 
and so brave and stalwart in so many 
good causes. It is a mighty loss. He 
had faults, like all of us, and needed for- 
giveness; and I think he could say, with 
David of old, that he would rather fall 
into the Lord's hands than into the hands 
of man." 

It is anticipating the years and inter- 
rupting the narrative to mention here a 
few of the men who gladdened his later 
life by their friendship, but the subject 
demands a brief space before we return 
to the current story of his days. 

Matthew Arnold went to see him upon 
his arrival in this country, and it is need- 
less to say that Whittier derived sincere 



64 



pleasure from the visit; but Arnokrs de- 
lightful recognition of Whittier's **In 
School Days," as one of the perfect poems 
which must live, gave him fresh assurance 
of fulfilled purpose in existence. He had 
followed Arnold with appreciation from 
his earliest appearance in the world of 
letters, and knew him, as it were, "by 
heart" long before a personal interview 
was possible. In a letter written after 
Arnold's return to England, he says: *'I 
share thy indignation at the way our 
people have spoken of him — one of the 
foremost men of our time, a true poet, a 
wise critic, and a brave, upright man, to 
whom all English-speaking people owe a 
debt of gratitude. I am sorry I could 
not see him again." 

When the end came, a few years later, 
he was among the first to say, "What a 
loss English literature has sustained in* 
the death of Matthew Arnold!" 

As I have already suggested, he kept 
the run of all the noteworthy people who 



T3 ^ 






5= fn 




65 



came to Boston quite as surely as they 
kept in pursuit of him. 

"I hope thee will see the wonderful 
prophet of the Bramo Somaj, Mozoom- 
dar, before he leaves the country. I 
should have seen him in Boston but for 
illness last week. That movement in 
India is the greatest event in the his- 
tory of Christianity . since the days of 
Paul. 

" So the author of 'Christie Johnstone' 
is dead. I have read and reread that 
charming little story with ever -increas- 
ing admiration. I am sorry for the 
coarseness of some of his later writings; 
but he was, after all, a great novelist, sec- 
ond only in our times to George Eliot, 
Dickens, and Thackeray. ... I shall be 
glad to hear more about Mr. Wood's and 

Mrs. 's talks. Any hint or sign or 

token from the unseen and spiritual 
world is full of solemn interest, standing 
as I do on the shore of ' that vast ocean 
I must sail so soon.'. . . 

5 



66 



^* You will soon have Amelia Edwards 
with you. I am sorry that I have not 
been able to call on her. Pray assure 
her of my sincere respect and admira- 
tion." 

And again : ' ' Have thee seen and heard 
the Hindoo Mohini? He seems to have 
really converted some people. I hear 
that one of them has got a Bible !" 

The phrase that he is *' beset by pil- 
grims" occurs frequently in his letters, 
contrasted with pleased expressions, and 
descriptions of visits from Phillips Brooks, 
Canon Farrar, Governor and Mrs. Claf- 
lin, and other friends whose faces were 
always a joy to him. 

I have turned aside from the narrative 
of every-day life to mention these friends ; 
but it is interesting to return and recall 
the earlier years, when he came one day 
to dine in Charles Street with Mr. Emer- 
son. As usual, his coming had been very 
uncertain. He was never to be counted 
upon as a visitor, but at length the moment 



67 



came when he was in better health than 
ordinary, and the stars were in conjunc- 
tion. I can recall his saying to Emerson : 
*'I had to choose between hearing thee 
at thy lecture and coming here to see 
thee. I chose to see thee. I could not 
do both." Emerson was heard to say to 
him, solicitously: ^' I hope you are pretty 
well, sir ! I believe you formerly bragged 
of bad health." 

It was Whittier's custom, however, to 
make quite sure that all "lions" and 
other disturbing elements were well out 
of the way before he turned his steps to 
the library'- in Charles Street. I recall 
his coming one Sunday morning when 
we were at church, and waiting until our 
return. He thought that would be a safe 
moment! He was full, as Madame de 
Sevigne ssijs/^ de conversations infinies,''' 
being especially interested just then in 
the question of schools for the freedmen, 
and eagerly discussed ways and means 
for starting and supporting them. 



68 



We were much amused by his inge- 
nuity in getting contributions from his 
home town. It appears that he had taken 
it into consideration that there were a 
number of carriage-makers in Amesbury. 
He suggested that each one of these men 
should give some part of a carriage — one 
the wheels, one the body, one the furnish- 
ings, etc., dividing it in all among twenty 
workmen. When it was put together, he 
had a carriage which was sold for two 
hundred dollars, which was exactly the 
sum requisite for Amesbury to give. 

He had just parted from his niece, who 
had gone to teach the freed people in a 
small Southern village. He could not 
help feeling anxious for her welfare. 
She and her young coworkers would be 
the only Northerners in the place. Of 
course, such new-comers would be re- 
garded with no friendly eye by the 
^'mean whites," and their long distance 
from home and from any protection 
would make their position a very forlorn 



69 



one indeed if the natives should turn 
against them. He was fearful lest they 
should be half starved. However, they 
had departed in excellent spirits, which 
went a long way to cheer everybody con- 
cerned. 

He was also full of sympathy and 
anxiety regarding the well-being of a 
young colored girl here at the North, 
whose sad situation he had been called 
upon to relieve; and after discussing 
ways and laying plans for her comfort 
(which he afterwards adhered to, until in 
later years she was placed in a happy 
home of her own), he went on to discuss 
the needs of yet a third young person, 
another victim of the war, who was then 
teaching in Amesbury. He was almost 
as remarkable as* Mrs. Child in his power 
of making his own small provision into 
a broad mantle to cover many shoulders. 
He was undaunted, too, in his efforts, 
where his own resources failed, to get 
what was needed by the help of others. 



TO 



His common-sense was so great, and his 
own habits so frugal, that no one could 
imagine a dollar wasted or misapplied 
that was confided to his stewardship. 
His benefactions were ceaseless, and they 
were one of the chief joys of his later life. 
The subject of what may be done for this 
or that person or cause is continually 
recurring in his letters. Once I find this 
plea in verse after the manner of Burns: 

" well-paid author, fat-fed scholar, 
Whose pockets jingle with the dollar, 
No sheriff's hand upon your collar. 

No duns to bother. 
Think on't, a tithe of what ye swallow 

Would save your brother!" 

And again and again there are passages 
in his letters like the following: ''I hope 
the Industrial Home may be saved, and 
wish I was a rich man just long enough 
to help save it. As it is, if the subscrip- 
tion needs $30 to fill it up, I shall be glad 
to give the mite." " I have long follow- 
ed Maurice," he says again, ^'in his work 



71 



as a religious and social reformer— a true 
apostle of the gospel of humanity. He 
saw clearly, and in advance of his cleri- 
cal brethren, the necessity of wise and 
righteous dealing with the momentous 
and appalling questions of labor and 
poverty." 

He wrote one day: " If you go to Rich- 
mond, why don't you visit Hampton and 
Old Point Comfort, where that Christian 
knight and latter-day Galahad, General 
Armstrong, is making his holy experi- 
ment ? I think it would be worth your 
while." 

General Armstrong and his brave work 
in founding and maintaining the Hamp- 
ton School for the education, at first, of 
the colored people alone, and finally for 
the Indians also, was one of the near and 
living interests of Whittier's life. Often 
and often in his letters do we find refer- 
ences to the subject; either he regrets 
having to miss seeing the General, upon 
one of his Northern trips, or he re- 



72 



joices in falling in witli some of the teach- 
ers at Asquani Lake or elsewhere, or his 
note is jubilant over some new gift whicli 
will make the General's work for the year 
less difficult. 

Once he writes: " I am grieved to hear 
of General Armstrong's illness. I am 
not surprised at it. He has been work- 
ing in his noble cause beyond any mortal 
man's strength. He must have a rest if 
it is possible for him, and his friends must 
now keep up the school by redoubled ef- 
forts. Ah me! There is so much to be 
done in this world ! I wish I were young- 
er or a millionaire." 

And yet again: " I had the pleasure of 
sending General Armstrong at Christmas, 
with my annual subscription, one thou- 
sand dollars which a friend placed in my 
hand. I wish our friend could be relieved 
from the task of raising money by a hun- 
dred such donations." 

The choice of the early breakfast hour 
for his visits was his own idea. He was 




THE HOUSE AT HAMPTON FALLS 

Whiltier on the balcony 



73 



glad to hit upon a moment which was 
not subject to interruptions, one when he 
could talk at his ease of books and men. 
These visits were always a surprise. He 
liked to be abroad in good season, and 
had rarely missed seeing the sun rise in 
forty years. He knew, too, that we were 
not late people, and that his visits could 
never be untimely. Occasionally, with 
the various evening engagements of a 
city, we were not altogether fit to receive 
him, but it was a pleasure to hear his 
punctual ring, and to know that we should 
find him in the library by the fire. He 
was himself a bad sleeper, seldom, as he 
said, putting a solid bar of sleep between 
day and day, and therefore often early 
abroad to question the secrets of the dawn. 
We owe much of the intimate friendship 
of our life to these morning hours spent 
in private, uninterrupted talk. 

" I have lately felt great sympathy with 

," he said one morning, "for I have 

been kept awake one hundred and twenty 



hours— an experience I should not care to 
try again." 

One of Whittier's summer pleasures, 
in which he occasionally indulged him- 
self, was a visit to the Isles of Shoals. 
He loved to see his friend Celia Thaxter 
in her island home, and he loved the free- 
dom of a lurge hotel. He liked to make 
arrangements with a group of his more 
particular friends to meet him there; and 
when he was well enough to leave his 
room, he might be seen in some carefully 
chosen corner of the great piazzas, shady 
or sunny, as the day invited him, enjoying 
the keenest happiness in the voluntary so- 
ciety and conversation of those dear to him. 
Occasionally he would pass whole days 
in Celia Thaxter's parlor, watching her 
at her painting in the window, and listen- 
ing to the conversation around him. He 
Avished to hear and know what interested 
others. He liked nothing better, he once 
said, than going intq the "store'' in the 



75 



old days at Amesbury, wlien it was a com- 
mon centre, almost serving the purpose 
of what a club may be in these later days, 
and sitting upon a barrel to hear ^' folks 
talk." The men there did not know much 
about his poetry, but they understood his 
politics, and he was able to put in many 
a word to turn the vote of the town. In 
Celia Thaxter's parlor he found a differ- 
ent company, but his relations to the peo- 
ple who frequented that delightful place 
were practically the same. He wished to 
understand their point of view, if pos- 
sible, and then, if lie could find opportu- 
nity, he would help them to a higher stand- 
point. 

I remember one season in particular, 
when the idle talk of idle people had been 
drifting in and out during the day, while 
he sat patiently on in the corner of the 
pretty room. Mrs. Thaxter was steadily 
at work at her table, yet always hospita- 
ble, losing sight of no cloud or shadow or 
sudden gleam of glory in the landscape. 



1Q 



and pointing tlie talk often with keen 
wit. Nevertheless, the idleness of it all 
palled upon him. It was Sunday, too, 
and he longed for something which would 
move us to "higher levels." Suddenly, 
as if the idea had struck him like an in- 
spiration, he rose, and taking a volume of 
Emerson from the little library, he opened 
to one of the discourses, and handing it 
to Celia Thaxter, said : 

"Eead that aloud, will thee? I think 
we should all like to hear it." 

After she ended he took up the thread 
of the discourse, and talked long and ear- 
nestly upon the beauty and necessity of 
worship — a necessity consequent upon the 
nature of man, upon his own weakness, 
and his consciousness of the Divine Spirit 
within him. His whole heart was stirred, 
and he poured himself out towards us as 
if he longed, like the prophet of old, to 
breathe a new life into us. I could see 
that he reproached himself for not having 
spoken out in this way before, but his 



enfranchised spirit took only a stronger 
flight for the delay. 

I have never heard of Whittier's speak- 
ing in the meeting-house, although he was 
doubtless often '^ moved" to do so, but to 
us who heard him on that day he became 
more than ever a light unto our feet. It 
was not an easy thing to do to stem the 
accustomed current of life in this way, 
and it is a deed only possible to those 
who, in the Bible phrase, *'walk with 
God." 

Such an unusual effort was not with- 
out its consequences. It was followed 
by a severe headache, and he was hardly 
seen abroad again during his stay. 

We heard from him again, shortly af- 
ter, under the shadow of the great hills 
where he always passed a part of every 
year. He loved them, and wrote elo- 
quently of the loveliness of nature at Os- 
sipee: '*the Bear Camp winding down" 
the long green valley close by the 
door, the long Sandwich and Waterville 



78 



ranges, and Chocorua filling up the hori- 
zon from west to north-east. 

The frequent loneliness of his life often 
found expression. Once he says: 

' ' I wish I could feel that I deserved a 
tithe even of the kind things said of me 
hy my personal friends. If one could 
but be as easily as preach! The confes- 
sion of poor Burns might, I fear, be made 
of the best of us: 

" ' God knows I'm no the thing I would be, 
Nor am I even the thing I could be.* 

And yet I am thankful every day of 
my life that God has put it into the hearts 
of so many whom I love and honor and 
reverence to send me so many messages 
of good-will and kindness. It is an un- 
speakable comfort in the lonely and dark- 
ening afternoon of life. Indeed, I can 
never feel quite alone so long as I know 
that all about me are those who turn to 
me with friendly interest, and, strange to 
say, with gratitude. A sense of lack of 



desert on my part is a drawback, of course ; 
but then, I say to myself, if my friends 
judge me by my aim and desire, and not 
by my poor performance, it may be all 
right and just." 

The painful solitude of his life after his 
dear niece's marriage was softened when 
he went to live with his cousins at Oak 
Knoll, in Danvers, a pleasant country- 
seat, sheltered and suited to his needs. 

Of this place Mrs. SpoflPord says, in a 
delightful biographical paper: *'The es- 
tate of Oak Knoll is one of some histor- 
ical associations, as here once lived the 
Rev. George Burroughs, the only clergy- 
man in the annals of Salem witchcraft 
who was hung for dark dealings, Dan- 
vers having originally been a part of the 
town of Salem, where witchcraft came to 
a blaze, and was stamped out of exist- 
ence. . . . The only relic on the place of 
its tragedy is the well of the Burroughs' 
house, which is still in the hay-field, and 
over which is the resting-place of the 



80 



sounding-board of the pulpit in the 
church where the witches were tried." 

At Danvers he was able to enjoy the 
free open air. He loved to sit under the 
fine trees which distinguished the lawn, 
to play with the dogs, and wander about 
unmolested until he was tired. The la- 
dies of the house exerted themselves to 
give him perfect freedom and the tender- 
est care. The daughter became his play- 
mate, and she never quite grew up, in his 
estimation. She was his lively and lov- 
ing companion. Writing from Danvers, 
one December, he says, ' ' What with the 
child, and the dogs, and Rip Van Winkle, 
the cat, and a tame gray squirrel who 
hunts our pockets for nuts, we contrive to 
get through the short dark days." 

Again: "I am thankful that Februarj^ 
has come, and that the sun is getting 
high on his northern journey. The past 
month has been trying to flesh and spirit. 
... I am afraid my letter has a com- 
plaining tone, and I am rather ashamed 



81 



of it, and shall be more so when my head 
is less out of order. . . . There are two gray 
squirrels playing in my room. Phoebe 
calls them Deacon Josiah and his wife 
Philury, after Rose Terry Cooke's story 
of the minister's 'week of works' in the 
place of a ' week of prayer.' " 

He showed more physical vitality after 
he went to Dan vers, and his notes evince 
a wide interest in matters private and 
public outside his own library life. He 
still went to Portland to see his niece and 
her husband whenever he was able, and 
now and then to Boston also. But Phila- 
delphia at the time of the Centennial was 
not to be thought of. "I sent my hymn," 
he wrote from Amesbury in 1876, "with 
many misgivings, and am glad it was so 
well received. I think I should like to 
have heard the music, but probably I 
should not have understood. The gods 
have made me most unmusical." 

"I have just got J. T. P.'s charming 
little book of 'Barry Cornwall and His 



82 



Friends. ' It is a most companionable vol- 
ume, and will give rare pleasure to thou- 
sands. ... I write in the midst of our 
Quaker quarterly meeting, and our house 
has been overrun for three days. We 
had twelve to dine to-day; they have now 
gone to meeting, but I am too tired for 
preaching. 

^'I don't expect to visit Philadelphia. 
The very thought of that Ezekiel's vision 
of machinery and the nightmare confu- 
sion of the world's curiosity shop appalls 
me. I shall not venture." 

He was full of excellent resolutions 
about going often to Boston, but he never 
could make a home there. ' ' I see a great 
many more things in the city than thee 
does," he would say, *' because I go to 
town so seldom; The shop- windows are a 
delight to me, and everything and every- 
body is novel and interesting. I don't 
need to go to the theatre. I have more 
theatre than I can take in every time I 
walk out." 



No sketch of Whittier, however slight, 
should omit mention of his friendship 
for Bayard Taylor. Their Quaker parent- 
age helped to bring the two poets into 
communion ; and although Taylor was so 
much the younger and more vigorous 
man, Whittier was also to see him pass, 
and to mourn his loss. He took a deep 
interest in his literary advancement, and 
considered *' Lars " his finest poem. Cer- 
tainly no one knew Taylor's work better, 
or brought a deeper sympathy into his 
reading of it. ''I love him too well to 
be a critic of his verse," he says, in one 
of his letters. * ' But what a brave worker 
he was!" 

The reading of good books was, very 
late in life, as it had been very early, his 
chief pleasure. His travels, his romance, 
his friendships, were indulged in chiefly by 
proxy of the printed page. *' I felt very 
near Dr. Mulford through his writings," 
he said. *'He w^as the strongest thinker 
of our time, and he thought in the right 



direction. 'The Republic of God' is in- 
tellectually greater than St. Augustine's 
'City of God,' and infinitely nearer the 
Christian ideal." 

"That must be a shrewd zephyr," 
Charles Lamb used to say, speaking of his 
Gentle Giantess, "that can escape her." 
And so we may say of Whittier and a 
book. " Has thee seen the new book by 
the author of ' Mr. Isaacs ?' " he asked 
(having sent me " Mr. Isaacs " as soon as it 
appeared, lest I should miss reading so 
novel and good a story). In the same 
breath he adds: "I have been reading 
'The Freedom of Faith,' by the author 
of 'On the Threshold,' just published by 
Houghton & Co. It is refreshing and 
tonic as the north-west wind. The writer 
is one of the leaders of the new departure 
from ultra-Calvinism. Thank thee just 
here for the pleasure of reading Annie 
Keary's biography. What a white, beau- 
tiful soul! Her views of the mission of 
Spiritualism seem very much like 's. 



I do not know when I have read a more 
restful, helpful book. 

*' How good Longfellow's poem is! A 
little sad, but full of ' sweetness and 
light.' Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, 
and myself are all getting to be old fel- 
lows, and that swan-song might serve for 
us all. ' We who are about to die.' God 
help us all ! I don't care for fame, and 
have no solicitude about the verdicts of 
posterity. 

" ' When the grass is green above us, 

And they who know us and who love us 

Are sleeping by our side, 
Will it avail us aught that men 
Tell the world with lip and pen 
That we have lived and died?* 

*' What we are will then be more im- 
portant than what we have done or said 
in prose or rhyme, or what folks that we 
never saw or heard of think of us." 

Later he describes himself as listening 
to the ' ' Life of Mrs. Stowe. " ' * It is a satis- 



86 



fying book, a model biography, or, rather, 
autobiography, for dear Mrs. Stowe speaks 
all through it. Dr. Holmes's letters re- 
veal him as he is — wise, generous, chival- 
rous. Witness the kindliness and delicate 
sympathy of his letters during the Lord 
Byron trouble. . . . Miss W. has read us 
some of Howells's ' Hazard of New Fort- 
unes.' It strikes me that it is a strong 
book. That indomitable old German, 
Linden — that saint of the rather godless 
sect of dynamiters and anarchists — is a 
grand figure ; one can't help loving him." 
The poet's notes and letters are full of 
passages showing how closely he followed 
public affairs. "If I were not sick, and 
to-morrow were not election -day," he 
says, " I should go to Boston. I hope to 
be there in a few days, at any rate. You 
must * vote early and often,' and elect 
Hooper. Here we are having Marryat's 
triangular duel acted over by our three 
candidates. I wish they were all car- 
pet-bagging among the Ku-kluxes. It 



87 



wouldn't hurt us to go without a repre- 
sentative until we can raise one of our 
own.". . . 

And again : ' ' I am somewhat disap- 
pointed by the vote on the suffrage ques- 
tion. It should he a lesson to us not to 
trust to political platforms. A great 
many Eepublicans declined to vote for it 
or against it. They thought the leaders 
of the suffrage movement had thrown 
themselves into the hands of Butler and 
the Democrats. However, it is only one 
^^f those set-backs which all reforms must 
have — temporary, but rather discourag- 
ing." 

*'I worked hard in our town, and we 
made a gain of nearly one hundred votes 
over last year." 

"I am happy," he says later, ^'in the 
result of the election — thankful that the 

State has sat down heavily on . I 

never thought of taking an active inter- 
est in politics this year, but I could not 
help it when the fight began." 



And still later in life: "I am glad of 
the grand overturn in Boston, and the 
courage of the women voters. How did 
it seem to elbow thy way to the polls 
through throngs of men folk?" 

Whittier never relinquished his house 
at Amesbury, where his kind friends, 
Judge C^te and his wife, always made 
him feel at home. As the end of his life 
drew near, it was easy to see that the vil-" 
lage home where his mother and his sis- 
ter lived and died was the place he chiefly 
loved; but he was more inaccessible to 
his friends in Amesbury, and the inter- 
ruptions of a fast-growing factory town 
were sometimes less agreeable to him 
than the country life at Oak Knoll. He 
was a great disbeliever in too much soli- 
tude, however, and used to say, ^'The 
necessary solitude of the human soul 
is enough; it is surprising how great 
that is." 

Once only he expresses this preference 
for the dear old village home in his let- 



ters. "I have been at Amesbury for a 
fortniglit. Somehow I seem nearer to 
my mother and sister ; the very walls of 
the rooms seem to have become sensitive 
to the photographs of unseen presences." 

Towards the end of his days, however, 
he spent more and more time with his 
beloved cousins Gertrude and Joseph 
Cartland, whose interests and aims in 
life were so close to his own. 

The habit of going to the White Mount- 
ains in their company for a few weeks 
during the heat of summer was a fixed 
one. He grew to love Asquam, with its 
hills and lakes, almost better than any 
other place for this sojourn. It was 
there he loved to beckon his friends to 
join him. "Do come, if possible," he 
would write. "The years speed on; it 
will soon be too late. I long to look on 
your dear faces once more." 

His deafness began to preclude general 
conversation ; but he delighted in getting 
off under the pine-trees in the warm af- 



90 



ternoons, or into a quiet room up-stairs 
at twilight, and talking until bedtime. 
He described to us, during one visit, his 
first stay among the hills. His parents 
took him where he could see the great 
wooded slope of Agamenticus. As he 
looked up and gazed with awe at the 
solemn sight, a cloud drooped, and hung 
suspended as it were from one point, and 
filled his soul with astonishment. He had 
never forgotten it. He said nothing at 
the time, but this cloud hanging from the 
breast of the hill filled his boyish mind 
with a mighty wonder, which had never 
faded away. 

Notwithstanding his strong feeling for 
Amesbury, and his presence there always 
at "quarterly meeting," he found him- 
self increasingly comfortable at Dan- 
vers and happy in the companionship of 
his devoted relatives. Something nearer 
" picturesqueness " and "the beautiful" 
came to please the sense and to soothe the 
spirit at Oak Knoll. He did not often 



91 



make record in his letters of these things ; 
but once he speaks charmingly of the 
young girl in a red cloak, on horseback, 
with the dog at her side, scampering over 
the lawn and brushing under the sloping 
branches of the trees. The sunset of liis 
life burned slowly down, yet in spite of 
illness and loss of power, he possessed his 
soul in patience. After a period when he 
felt unable to write, he revived and sent 
a letter, in which he spoke as follows of 
a poem which had been sent for his revi- 
sion: "The poem is solemn and tender; 
it is as if a wind from the Unseen World 
blew over it, in which the voice of sorrow 
is sweeter than that of gladness — a holy 
fear mingled with holier hope. For my- 
self, my hope is always associated with 
dread, like the shining of a star through 
mist. I feel, indeed, that Love is vic- 
torious, that there is no dark it cannot 
light, no depth it cannot reach ; but I im- 
agine that between the Seen and the Un- 
seen there is a sort of neutral ground, a 



92 



land of shadow and mystery, of strange 
voices and undistinguished forms. There 
are some, as Charles Lamb says, ' who 
stalk into futurity on stilts,' without awe 
or self-distrust. But I can only repeat 
the words of the poem before me." . . . 

One of the last, perhaps the very last 
visit he made to his friends in Boston was 
in the beautiful autumn weather. The 
familiar faces he hoped to find were ab- 
sent. He arrived without warning, and 
the very loveliness of the atmosphere 
which made it possible for him to travel 
had tempted younger people out among 
the falling leaves. He was disappointed, 
and soon after sent these verses to re- 
hearse his experience: 

**I stood within the vestibule 

Whose granite steps I knew so well, 
While through the empty rooms the bell 
Responded to my eager pull. 

"I listened while the bell once more 

Rang through the void, deserted hall ; 



I heard no voice, nor light foot-fall, 
And turned me sadly from the door. 

"Though fair was Autumn's dreamy day, 
And fair the wood-paths carpeted 
With fallen leaves of gold and red, 
I missed a dearer sight than they. 

^' I missed the love-transfigured face, 
The glad, sweet smile so dear to me, 
The clasp of greeting warm and free : 
What had the round world in their place ? 

"0 friend, whose generous love has made 
My last days best, my good intent 
Accept, and let the call I meant 
Be with your coming doubly paid." 

But even this journey was beyond his 
strength. He wrote: "Coming' back 
from Boston in a crowded car, a window 
was opened just behind me and another 
directly opposite, and, in consequence, I 
took a bad cold, and am losing* much of 
this gx)od]y autumnal spectacle. But Oak 
Knoll woods were never, I think, so beau- 
tiful before." 



In future his friends were to seek him; 
he could go no more to them ; the autumn 
had indeed set in. 

Now began a series of birthday celebra- 
tions, which were blessings not unmixed 
in his cup of life. He was. in the habit 
of writing a brief note of remembrance 
on these anniversaries; in one of which, 
after confessing to " a feeling of sadness 
and loneliness," he turns to the Emerson 
Calendar, and says, *'I found for the 
day some lines from his ' World Soul ' — 

" ' Love wakes anew this throbbing heart, 
And we are never old; 
Over the winter glaciers 

I see the summer glow, 
And through the wild piled snow-drift 
The warm rose-buds blow.' 

Reading them, I took heart."" 

On another occasion he says: **In the 
intervals of visitation on that day my 
thoughts were with dear friends who 
have passed from us ; among whom, I 
need not say, was thy dearest friend. 



95 



How vividly the beautiful mornings v^ith 
you were recalled ! Then I wondered at 
my age, and if it was possible that I was 
the little boy on the old Haverhill farm, 
unknown, and knowing nobody beyond 
my home horizon. I could not quite 
make the connection of the white-haired 
man with the black-locked boy. I could 
not help a feeling of loneliness, thinking 
of having outlived many of my life-com- 
panions; but I was still grateful to God 
that I had not outlived my love for them 
and for those still living. Among the 
many tokens of good-will from all parts 
of the country and beyond the sea, there 
were some curious and amazing missives. 
One Southern woman took the occasion 
to include me in her curse of the ' mean, 
hateful Yankees.' To offset this, I had 
a telegram from the Southern Forestry 
Congress assembled in Florida, signed by 
president and secretary, informing me 
that ' In remembrance of your birthday, 
we have planted a live-oak tree to your 



memory, which, like the leaves of the 
tree, will be forever green.' " 

Birthdays, on the whole, in the face of 
much sadness, brought him also much that 
was agreeable and delightful in remem- 
brance. One old friend always gave him 
great pleasure by sending a huge basket 
of gilded wicker, in which were placed 
fruits of every variety from all quarters 
of the globe, and covered with rare flow- 
ers and ferns. In this way he visited 
the gardens of the Orient, and could see 
in his imagination the valleys of Napa 
and of Shiraz. On the occasion of a din- 
ner given him at the Brunswick Hotel, 
on his seventieth birthday, he wrote: "I 
missed my friend. In the midst of so 
much congratulation, I do not forget his 
earlier appreciation and encouragement, 
and every kind word which assured and 
cheered me when the great public failed 
to recognize me. I dare not tell thee for 
fear of seeming to exaggerate how much 
his words have been to me." 



Thus tlie long years and the long days 
passed on with scarcely perceptible dimi- 
nution of interest in the affairs of this 
world. ''I am sorry to find that the 
hard winter has destroyed some hand- 
some spruces I planted eight years ago," 
he wrote one May day; "they had 
grown to be fine trees. Though rather 
late for me, I shall plant others in their 
places; for I remember the advice of the 
old Laird of Dumbiedikes to his son Jock: 
'When ye hae naething better to do, ye 
can be aye sticking in a tree ; it '11 aye 
be growin' when ye are sleeping.' There is 
an ash-tree growing here that my mother 
planted with her own hands at threescore 
and ten. What agnostic folly to think that 
tree has outlived her who planted it !" 

The lines of Whittier's life stretched 
"between heaven and home " during the 
long period of eighty-four years. A host 
of friends, friends of the spirit, were, as 
we have seen, forever clustering around 
him ; and what a glorious company it 



was! Follen, Shipley, Clialkley, Lucy 
Hooper, Joseph Sturge, Cbanning, Lydia 
Maria Child, his sister Elizabeth — a shin- 
ing cloud too numerous to mention ; the 
inciters of his poems and the companions 
of his fireside. In the silence of his 
country home their memories clustered 
about him and filled his heart with joy. 

"He loved the good and wise, but found 
His human lieart to all akin 
Who met him on the common ground 
Of suffering and of sin." 

His "Home Ballads" grew out of this 
very power of clinging to the same places 
and the old loves, and-what an incompar- 
able group they make! "Telling the 
Bees," "Skipper Ireson's Ride," "My 
Playmate," "In School Days," are suffi- 
cient in themselves to set the seal to his 
great fame. 

As a traveller, too, he is unrivalled, 
giving us, without leaving his own gar- 
den, the fine fruit of foreiofn lands. In 



reading" his poems of the East, it is diffi- 
cult to believe that he never saw Pales- 
tine, nor Ceylon, nor India; and the won- 
der is no less when he writes of our own 
wide country. Indeed, the vividness of 
his poems about the slaves at St. Helena's 
Island and elsewhere make them among 
the finest of all his local poems. One 
called "The Pass of the Sierra" may ea- 
sily bear the palm among much descrip- 
tive writing. 

He watched over his last remaining 
brother during a long illness and death, 
during the autumn and winter of 1882 
and '83 in Boston. The family all left 
Oak Knoll and came to be with him at a 
hotel, whence he could make frequent 
visits to his brother's bedside; but the 
unwonted experience of passing several 
months in town, and the wearing mis- 
sion which brought him there, told seri- 
ously upon his health, and caused well- 
grounded anxiety as to the result. The 



100 



day after the last services had been per- 
formed he wrote to a friend: " Indeed, it 
was a great comfort to sit beside you and 
to feel that if another beloved one had 
passed into the new life beyond sight 
and hearing, the warm hearts of loved 
friends were beating close to my own. 
You do not know how grateful it was to 
me. Dr. Clarke's presence and words 
were full of comfort. My brother did 
not approve of a display of flowers, but 
he loved violets, and your simple flowers 
were laid in his hand. . . .Give my love 
to S., and kiss the dear child for me." 

It was not, however, until 1890 that we 
could really feel he had left the years of 
active service and of intellectual achieve- 
ment as things of the past. He was shut 
out from much that gave him pleasure, 
but the spirit which animated the still 
breathing frame, though waiting and at 
times longing for larger opportunity, 
seemed to us like a loving sentinel, cov- 
ering his dear ones as with a shield, and 



101 



watching over the needs of humanity. 
The advance of the colored people, the 
claims of the Indians and their wrongs, 
opportunities for women, statesmen, and 
politicians, the private joys and sorrows 
of those dear to him, were all present and 
kept alive, though in the silence of his 
breast. 

The end came, the door opened while 
he was staying with the daughter of an 
old friend at Hampton Falls, in New 
Hampshire— that saintly woman whom 
we associate with one of the most spir- 
itual and beautiful of his poems, "A 
Friend's Burial." After a serious illness 
in the winter of 1892 he was almost too 
frail for any summer journeying, but 
with his usual wisdom and instinctive 
turning of the heart towards old famil- 
iar places, he thought of this hospitable 
house where he seemed to gain strength, 
and where he found much happiness and 
the quietness that he loved. His last ill- 
ness was brief; he was ministered to by 



102 



those who stood nearest him. And thus 
the waves of time passed over him and 
swept him from our sight. 

It is a pleasure now to recall many a 
beautiful scene in summer afternoons, 
under the trees at Dan vers, when his 
spirit animated the air and made the 
landscape shine with a radiance not its 
own. Such memories serve to keep the 
whole world beautiful wherein he moved, 
and add to his poetry a sense of presence 
and a living light. 

Old age appears to every other stage of 
human existence as a most undesirable 
state. We look upon its approaches and 
its ravages with alarm. Death itself is 
far less dreadful, and "the low door," 
if it will only open quickly, brings little 
fear to the thoughtful mind. But the 
mystery of decadence, the long sunset- 
ting, the loss of power — what do they 
mean? The Latin word saga^ from which 
the French get la sagesse, and we "the 
sage," gives us a hint of what we do not 



103 



always understand — the spiritual beauty 
and the significance even of loss in age. 

Wliittier, wearing his silver crown, 
brouglit the antique word into use again, 
and filled it watli fresh meaning for mod- 
ern men. 



THE END 



